Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman offered a postmortem of the Northern Illinois loss and looked ahead to the Purdue matchup. Losing in five specific categories led to the defeat, according to Freeman: turnovers, explosive gains (big plays), time of possession, rushing yardage and third-down conversions.
Regarding injured players, Freeman said wide receiver Jordan Faison will return on Saturday, while tackle Tosh Baker will be out, while defensive end Joshua Burnham is questionable. Freeman said the biggest challenges against Purdue will be stopping their running game and running the ball against them.
Freeman pointed to the mental aspects of dealing with the loss and how staying the course is the best approach.
“We have to be able to handle success and how you do that is you don’t change the approach in your mindset each week.”
Despite the similarity to last year in suffering the team’s first defeat early in the year, Freeman felt that ignoring opinions that looked at the 2024 situation from a season-wide perspective. worked best
“That doesn’t matter. This week matters and who cares about the rest of that stuff. We gotta take care of this week and that’s gotta be our mindset.
Freeman spoke about the Notre Dame defensive tackles and the problems that unit had in stopping the run in the NIU loss.
“Armel (Mukam) is improving and probably right now is your fifth inside guy. (Gabe) Rubio will be back … in a couple weeks. But I think Howard (Cross), Rylie (Mills), (Donovan) Hinish and even (Jason) Onye did a good job. We gave up way too many rushing yards … They (NIU) did a good job of forcing us to be lateral and that’s not who we are.”
The value of practice to develop consistency and fixing problems from Saturday’s loss were expanded upon by Freeman.
“What we didn’t do well is correcting some of the mistakes in practice to the point that we executed it right in the game … What we have to do is take some of the plays that we didn’t execute, for whatever reason, in practice and get it corrected so that in the game, we can execute it at the level we want to.”
Freeman explained why the balance between running and passing plays on offense against Northern Illinois was skewed in favor of the pass.
“When you have back-to-back three-and-outs and I think the one interception drive, we had four plays, that’s gonna affect the amount of carries that we can give our running backs. So we gotta be more efficient on first down, on first and second down, really, so we can create more plays.”
Leonard’s accuracy issues against NIU were not related to any health concerns, according to Freeman, who first noted that replacing Leonard with backup Steve Angeli wasn’t considered.
“No, there was no consideration of that. We got a lot of faith in Riley and him running our offense. We got a lot of belief in Steve, too … The quarterback is like the head coach. He is going to … get the blame and he’s going to get the praise. There are times that he (Leonard) has to throw the ball better. He knows that. His fundamentals have to better. His decision-making has to be better. But we also have to be better around him.”
Freeman indicated that NIU also won the contested catches battle but noted that Irish receivers are accomplishing such grabs during practice sessions.
“They’re battling. You can see it in one-on-ones, you can see it when we go good-on-good. It’s always a battle.”
The struggles to expand the passing game beyond short and intermediate passes were discussed.
“There’s opportunities to throw the ball down the field. We gotta do it, make the decision to throw it there … one time, he dropped it, another time it got picked off and a couple times, he (Riley Leonard) scrambled. So, there’s a lot of different things that go into the passing game that we have to improve on.
Director of Analytics Anthony Tresch’s role on the sidelines and how it relates to clock management was dissected by Freeman.
“He has the book (where) we talk about when we want to go for it in certain situations on fourth down. I like to use that as a reference in terms of when to call timeouts.”
Freeman explained what his idea of mental preparation for a game looks like after a defeat.
“The mindset you have right now, the way you want to go ahead and attack this week should be the same, whatever happened the previous week … I want to make sure these guys have the same hunger, the same approach in terms of their mental preparation for a game and respect for their opponents, no matter who we play.”
Well I guess we have our answer at QB. Riley will be the starter for the foreseeable future. Yes, Riley was not the only problem the Irish had with NIU. There were a lot of problems across the board. But it’s noteworthy that Riley did not look all that great at Texas A&M either. I’m still not entirely sure why he looked for a transfer at QB. I thought Angelli was a good enough starter.
If I were the coaching staff I’d start to worry about recruiting elite QBs in the future if they see recruited QBs keep getting benched in favor of transfer players. Hell, if I were Angelli I’d probably start to wonder if I really had a future at ND if I kept riding the bench game after game in favor of Riley.
Sadly I’m starting to wonder if Freeman is any better at developing QBs than BK was. We had soooo many highly touted recruits come in at QB for ND under BK that fizzled out under his watch. EG, Zaire, Wimbush…… Came in with so much promise and then on the field and nothing. The only difference here is we’re not even seeing our recruited QBs take the field for the most part in favor of transfers.